Admin's logbook

Discourse upped to beta 11+ and Docker to 1.10.

  • Major back-end changes, as I decided to try another VPS hosting provider that provides more resources at a lower price point. So we have a new server with double RAM.
  • Discourse now at 1.5b13

More back-end tuning. Attached images and other files are now hosted in Amazon S3.

We have just enabled https / SSL encryption on this site, courtesy of Let’s Encrypt. Let me know if you notice any issues.

I’m also using let’s encrypt; it’s nice but I wish you didn’t have to renew so often, even if it’s schedulable :stuck_out_tongue: . Anyway, this is a nice site to see if the ssl/https is implemented properly:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=cd-rw.org

You can get an A+ if you set up HSTS to be more strict (my site:
SSL Server Test: toxme.io (Powered by Qualys SSL Labs) )

Otherwise, yay for SSL!

Let’s Encrypt support is baked into Discourse so, that it should auto-renew the cert and therefore be “set it and forget it”-solution. There has been some bugs in the implementation during spring, thus I have not enabled it earlier. Bu tnot it seems to be ready for production, so let’s see how it goes.

Also the solution here is two-fold, as I use CloudFlare CDN in front of this website. I have not yet enabled HSTS is CloudFlare settings, but the support is there.

Some back-end updates today:

  • Updated to Discourse 1.5.3
  • Migrated to an energy efficient server at ScaleWay. We were running out of disk space, and even their cheapest offer has 50GB of SSD.
  • Discovered issues with out Twitter authentication - this should now be fixed.

A post was split to a new topic: Affordable VPS hosting

It seems that we have had a very sneaky issue of our ISP blocking the outgoing emails (SMPT ports) for a few days. Should be now fixed.

As a result a bunch of failed emails will now be sent out at once. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We just upgraded to Discourse 1.6, which brought a number of changes to the UX.

Discourse security update to 1.6.1.

Yesterday we did a Discourse security update to 1.6.2.

Did a complete front-end and back-end update. Now running on Discourse 1.6.6.

Brief downtime today, as we switched to a different server. Site should be a little more snappy and responsive now. While at it, upgraded everything so now running Discourse 1.6.9.

Advertising on this site was just reduced by ~50%. There is now only one ad banner per view, making the site faster to load and smoother to use.

So we are not shoveling a screen full of ads on your screen - please disable your adblocker for this site. Servers cost money.

Google sign-up and login had silently broken at some point. Noticed today and fixed. Should work now.

We are experiencing near zero organic growth. Ever since the Linx Tablet discussion cooled that, there has been almost zero user submitted posts. I would like to see this as a community rather than a blog.

Therefore we are taking a risky approach and implemented a full page Call to Action to our index view. Let’s hope that it encourages more people to sign up and discuss.

Discourse 1.7.1 maintenance upgrade.

Discourse 1.7.2 and also some server maintenance - the site should be a bit faster and more responsive now!

Sorry about the little maintenance break. Had to do some critical server maintenance. Discourse also updated to 1.7.3.